Questions on GPU compute

plain21

Junior Member
Jan 1, 2015
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Hi i am very interested on upgrading my current desktop to cater for my final year project. will be using abaqus 6.14 student edition and Ansys. just wondering if consumer GPUs work on these softwares? im googling high and low but i cant find the answer. Planning on getting the 280x to use as GPGPU but if only workstation GPU works, then might as well upgrade on other parts..

these are my current spec
i5-3570
4gb ram
intel hd 4000
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
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Looks like Abaqus might do OpenCL, but probably only on the standard edition. But your HD 4000 has OpenCL, so you might try using it there.

Looks like Ansys only does CUDA. Which is not uncommon. You're likely to be better off getting an Nvidia card.

- What's your budget?
- What's your power supply?
- And aren't you swapping to disk a lot with only 4GB RAM? That might be the thing to upgrade first.
 

plain21

Junior Member
Jan 1, 2015
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thanks for replying :D

if ansys only does cuda, then i have to go nvidia then, but will normal consumer gpu work? im trying to do it with abaqus using intel hd but the gpgpu option is greyed out..my PSU is seasonic 620w

as for RAM though, i knew it was'nt enough,but to what extent i should upgrade? 8gb? 16gb? my budget for upgrade is around $600
 

Enigmoid

Platinum Member
Sep 27, 2012
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thanks for replying :D

if ansys only does cuda, then i have to go nvidia then, but will normal consumer gpu work? im trying to do it with abaqus using intel hd but the gpgpu option is greyed out..my PSU is seasonic 620w

as for RAM though, i knew it was'nt enough,but to what extent i should upgrade? 8gb? 16gb? my budget for upgrade is around $600

Your PSU is a quality 620W which should be fine for any single GPU.

RAM should be at least 8 GB. It really depends on how RAM hungry your programs are.
 

plain21

Junior Member
Jan 1, 2015
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thanks a bunch :)

Yes my PSU is ok enough. So 16gb RAM is pretty ok to upgrade too right? do i need and SSD?
 

Headfoot

Diamond Member
Feb 28, 2008
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641
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A SSD will help if your loads are disk read or write constrained. It's also a nice upgrade for general system usability. However, I would say if you are strained on budget get your nVidia GPU + RAM before allocating budget for SSD
 

plain21

Junior Member
Jan 1, 2015
5
0
0
A SSD will help if your loads are disk read or write constrained. It's also a nice upgrade for general system usability. However, I would say if you are strained on budget get your nVidia GPU + RAM before allocating budget for SSD

Your PSU is a quality 620W which should be fine for any single GPU.

RAM should be at least 8 GB. It really depends on how RAM hungry your programs are.

Looks like Abaqus might do OpenCL, but probably only on the standard edition. But your HD 4000 has OpenCL, so you might try using it there.

Looks like Ansys only does CUDA. Which is not uncommon. You're likely to be better off getting an Nvidia card.

- What's your budget?
- What's your power supply?
- And aren't you swapping to disk a lot with only 4GB RAM? That might be the thing to upgrade first.


Right,so this is my first draft

RAM:16GB
GPU: Quadro K600 vs GTX 760

will these suffice?
 

njdevilsfan87

Platinum Member
Apr 19, 2007
2,348
268
126
Your version of Ansys should specify some kind of minimum CUDA capability requirement (ie compute 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, etc.). Then just find a GPU that supports that version or better. Ansys most likely utilizes double precision as well being a huge commercial package, and while DP will work on pretty much any GPU, how fast it computes is highly dependent on whether or not DP performance is castrated.

If you're doing compute on Ansys and on a budget, I believe that 3GB GTX 580 or Titan is the way to go (if you value DP speed). You can find either used. If you're just doing it to gain the experience, then any GTX 600/700 will also work but at lower DP performance (maybe Ansys even has the option to run SP to get full speed back at the cost of accuracy).
 
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